And as quickly as it came...

As quickly as it came, the lump of hideous swollen-ness disappeared. When I woke up this morning I was greeted by the little monster, and it had reached almost its previous record size (small peanut? large lima bean?) but then, suddenly, by noon it was basically gone, with just a little soft mushy spot in its place. If it hadn't gone away, I would have probably been very tempted to throw in the towel on the whole diet experiment, to be honest. Given that the whole idea is to see what effect eating different foods has on my symptoms, if I have a symptom that refuses to go away, it'd be hard to know if what I'm eating is making it stay around, making it get worse, or if it was just doing that on its own. So I'm glad my wrist is fine again today. But, as I'm essentially symptom-free again today, I tried milk when I got home from work. Milk!! I hadn't had any dairy product in almost eleven days!!

And...my CRP is down! C-reactive Protein is something your liver releases when you have inflammation in your body, and it responds pretty quickly to anything that's going on. The internet says CRP looks like this. Deceptively pretty, huh?

People who have consistently high CRP numbers are at more of a risk for heart disease and other bad stuff, and it because it's a indication of inflammation, it can clue you in to arthritis-type stuff going on too (as in yours truly). Normal range is like 0 - 4.9, and right before Christmas mine was 7.3. In fact, the day after I had that particular batch of blood drawn my hands and wrists went haywire and were worse than they'd been in a while. Makes sense to me...higher number, inflammation, pain! However, my blood from Friday (at which point I'd been eating sweet potatoes and fish for the entire past week) showed a CRP level of 0.4. So that's encouraging, at least inasmuch as it means something changed for the better. Whether that change is meaningful or lasting, I don't know. But I'll take what I can get.

Tomorrow I can have tea again!!! For the first time in almost two weeks! Going into this I thought tea would be the hardest thing to give up, because it is such a comforting habit for me, and such a part of how I relax when I get home from teaching all day. But surprisingly, once I kicked the chemical dependence on caffeine, a mug of hot water has been a curiously passable substitute. It's hot, steamy, warm to hold, and gives me something to sip on while I read. I mean, okay, it's a pretty lame substitute, but I haven't been as desperate as I had expected. Nonetheless, it will be really, really good to have a cup of tea tomorrow. Or several. Of different kinds. Mmm.